The amount of stupidity that led up to the Rust shooting is depressing and mind-boggling

Earlier today, a New Mexico court shut down a request from the attorneys for Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, who had been asking that the case against her—i.e., the involuntary manslaughter of Rust cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, killed on the movie’s set in October of 2021—be thrown out of court. Gutierrez-Reed’s team had been making the case that, after more than two years’ worth of public information about the case (including private messages from Gutierrez-Reed) being dropped into the public sphere, it was now impossible for her to get a fair trial in a prosecution for Hutchins’ death. (A judge, obviously, disagreed.)

Interestingly, the news of the failed dismissal—which arrives a week before Gutierrez-Reed’s trial proper is set to start—comes alongside one of the deepest dives to date into what sounds, increasingly, like the horrifyingly messy state of things on the set of the low-budget Western. THR’s Rebecca Keegan posted a sort of semi-profile of Gutierrez-Reed earlier this afternoon, which serves, in its own way, as a timeline of the confluence of terrible decisions that appear to have contributed to Hutchins’ death. The piece is fascinating, even if it waxes a bit too lyrical in places—it’s hard to really care what Gutierrez-Reed’s high school drama teacher thinks of her these days, if we’re being honest—because it lays out so much of the dysfunction apparently inherent to the Rust set. While also making the not-wholly-unpersuasive point that Gutierrez-Reed, one of the lowest-paid, least-experienced, least powerful people on the movie’s set, is the one most likely to face legal consequences for the events of October 2021.

(Compare, for instance, the treatment of Dave Halls, the first assistant director on the film, who Gutierrez-Reed has testified told her “We don’t have time” when she approached him for a weapons check on the gun that killed Hutchins on the day of the incident. Halls, a film veteran, took a plea deal last year on a charge of negligent use of a deadly weapon, and has already fulfilled his six months of unsupervised probation; according to Keegan’s piece, he’s since left the entertainment industry.)

Some of the most damning stuff in the piece is easy to fact-check, and pretty shocking: Gutierrez-Reed, for instance, only got the job—her second armorer job while working solo, outside the mentorship of her step-father, veteran industry armorer Thell Reed—because multiple, more experienced armorers turned it down. Not just for pay, which was low, but because the armorer was being asked to split duties as a prop assistant, with at least one person calling the splitting of attention on such a gun-heavy movie “completely unsafe.” There are also multiple reports of both Gutierrez-Reed and her boss, prop master Sarah Zachry (expected to testify at Gutierrez-Reed’s trial in exchange for immunity) saying they disposed of rounds or otherwise hid evidence in the aftermath of Hutchins’ death—to say nothing of the general chaos surrounding multiple members of the crew walking out on safety concerns before Hutchins died.

(Figuring out the origin of the live bullet that was in star/producer Alec Baldwin’s gun when it discharged, killing Hutchins and wounding director Joel Souza, remains its own infuriating can of worms; investigators apparently left the film’s props unwatched, unsearched, and unguarded in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, making tracking the provenance of the live ammo extremely difficult. Baldwin, who’s back up on charges of involuntary manslaughter himself, after prosecutors previously screwed up and charged him with a law that wasn’t on the books yet when the shooting took place, has thrown a lot of his considerable clout toward pushing focus on the origin of the bullet, and away from any other factors that might have made Rust an unsafe working environment.)

The upshot of all this is that Gutierrez-Reed’s trial is likely to be just as messy as the awful events that led up to it. (Among the info that’s been made public since 2021, there are a number of texts where she talks about alcohol and drug use while working on the movie; expect to see that point hammered unduly hard when the prosecution makes its case.) The thing that keeps cropping up here is that criminal trials, as such, aren’t really set up to handle situations where a bunch of people made a number of terrible decisions, leading to a terrible outcome. (Although expect civil cases against the producers of Rust to keep rolling out for a good long while; Hutchins’ husband, Matthew Hutchins, has settled his case, in exchange for profits from the yet-to-be-released film to help pay for the care of the couple’s son, but there are still others out there pending.)

Keegan’s piece makes the case, though, that Rust was an inherently dysfunctional set. The litany of improper safety procedures in the report is as extensive as it is depressing: The lack of safety glass to protect the people behind the camera; the failure by multiple people whose job it was to check the weapon to actually check the weapon; the repeated assertions that short shrift was given to training for the actors holding firearms, which may have contributed to Baldwin failing to follow proper procedures when he pointed the gun at people. (And, yes, the question of why, in the name of god, at least eight live bullets—including the one that killed Hutchins—were on the movie’s set.) The list of perpetual, apparently systemic failures on display is horrifying. And yet, for now, the finger of blame points solely at Guiterrez-Reed; it remains to be seen how that’ll shake out when her trial actually starts next week.